Daniel Egg ::
Box 3 "Dialog", 1997

installation
60 x 80 x 180 cm
courtesy Daniel Egg

Referring to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Dial M for Murder [1954], Daniel Egg features in his work Box 3 "Dialog" a medial construction of reality. Egg analyses subjective relations and mechanisms of gender constructions reflected in the media. He studies the »mirror image« and »reality« in their own medial characteristics, and reveals the interactions within their spatial aspects. Cross fading video images onto a real tape deck with the help of a semi-transparent mirror generates a visually perfect synchronism, resting somewhere between the real and the virtual.
The dialogue underlaying the installation is taken from the film, featuring both the voice of a man and a woman. The artist is replacing the cinematic moment of location shift, represented in the film by a traditional cut, in his work with the ritual of the changing of an audio tape. Following the rhythm of the film cuts the male or female person changes the tapes. Thus the women activates her voice through the action of her hands with which she stops the man’s voice by switching the cassettes, and vice versa. From present and absent, from real and virtual, the seeds of telematic culture are then be ordered as classic‚ odd couple, man and woman, shifted in metaphor from image to sound.